Date: Thu, 26 Jun 2003 18:44:55 -0400 (EDT) From: Robert Watson <rwatson@freebsd.org> To: Adam <blueeskimo@gmx.net> Cc: net@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Bandwidth monitoring Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.3.96L.1030626184123.67526A-100000@fledge.watson.org> In-Reply-To: <1056467581.42828.26.camel@jake>
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On 24 Jun 2003, Adam wrote: > My ISP is placing strict restrictions on how much I can transfer each > month, with high penalties for exceeding their limits. However, they > don't provide any way for their customer's to check to see how much > they've transferred, so we end up transferring far less than what we are > allowed, just to make sure we avoid paying the fines for going over the > limit. > > So, what I need to do is find a way to monitor my total bandwidth > through my external NIC. My gateway is running FreeBSD 4.8 with > ipf+ipnat. > > I *don't* need anything fancy. All I need is to be able to check at any > time how much I've transferred since the first of the month. What's the > easiest way to set up something like this? I know there are fancy > solutions with graphs with usage stats and such, but that's not what I'm > after. > > Thanks for your advice, I use the following home-grown tool to measure bandwidth consumed by the hosts on my ethernet segment: http://www.watson.org/~robert/freebsd/bpfmon.tgz It uses BPF to monitor traffic on the segment, and drops bandwidth samples into a data directory every five minutes. there's a post-processing script that generates a CSV of samples, by local host, for easy consumption in a spreadsheet. It's not a great program, but it is cute and works. Make sure to read the README if you use it; you have to set a few things at compile-time, since I wrote it for local use and never really attempted to generalize. I use it to monitor inbound and outbound IP traffic for around 400 hosts here for precisely the same reason you are interested :-). Robert N M Watson FreeBSD Core Team, TrustedBSD Projects robert@fledge.watson.org Network Associates Laboratories
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